The Money Makers

by Harry Bingham

  Eventually he was ready. He marched out of his office, briefcase in hand. He grabbed a blue woollen coat from the cupboard by the exit and headed out. He jumped into the waiting taxi and set off. The taxi driver refused to believe McAllister could make it. McAllister refused to believe he couldn’t. So far, so normal.

  McAllister looked at a string of e-mails his secretary had printed off, and a couple of research reports predicting meltdown on the Hang Seng. But bankers don’t read in taxis, they talk. Planes are for reading. He reached into the inside coat pocket, pulled out a phone and dialled his secretary. She would act as a switch­ board for the next hour or so, until he was walking down the gangway on to the plane. So far, so normal.

  When he got through, his secretary sounded surprised.

  ‘You’ve left your phone here on the desk. Has the driver lent you his? Anyway, I’ve arranged for you to collect a rental one on arrival in Frankfurt.’

  It was McAllister’s turn to be surprised.

  ‘No. I’m using the phone in my coat pocket.’ McAllister looked at the phone. A printed label told him that it was the property of Matthew Gradley at the London office of Madison.

  ‘Damn. I’ve pinched young Matthew Gradley’s coat. Can you tell him I’ve got it? Say he can take mine if he needs one this evening.’

  He turned to business and started to dictate replies to his e-mails, until the traffic heading west out of London threatened to end his hopes of making the flight. He ended the call temporarily and dropped the phone back into Matthew’s coat pocket. He gave the cabbie detailed instructions on how to avoid the traffic on the Cromwell Road, then reached back for the phone. He hit the redial button and waited for a connection.

  The number rang, then connected. The rings sounded different from the tone at Madison, but McAllister wasn’t really listening. Then a male voice answered.

  ‘Good morning. This is James Belial at Switzerland International. How may I be of service?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘James Belial,’ said Belial, speaking clearly. ‘Who’s calling, please?’

  ‘It’s Brian McAllister, James. But I’m afraid I have a wrong number. Very wrong.’

  McAllister hit the off button. He explored Matthew’s coat more thoroughly. Matthew carried two phones, both Nokias, nearly identical models. The phone McAllister had just used had no identification on the back, not even a note of the phone number.

  The burly Scotsman drummed on his briefcase, lost in thought. His mouth told nothing, but his blue eyes had turned to ice. Then he took out Matthew’s work phone and hit the redial button again. This time he got through to his secretary.

  ‘Put me through to Fiona Shepperton, please,’ he asked.

  8

  Josephine enjoyed the lines of computer code. Its exactitude was pleasing. A well-written computer program could run for thousands of lines and the outcome would be precisely known, plotted to within nanomillimetres by the intricate structure of logical commands. Tonight, she was setting herself the biggest challenge so far; one that Kodaly himself would be impressed by.

  It had been a good evening. Her mother was as well as she had been for ages and was now happy to doze a little in front of the telly. Josephine sat beside her mother, giving her a gentle shoulder massage to let her know that she was there. In her half-sleep, Helen Gradley sighed. Foggy though her world had become, with her daughter by her side, it was a safe world, even pleasant.

  Josephine began to work. When she needed to pause, she stretched out, found her mother’s hand and began to rub it, eliciting further sighs of contentment. Josephine would never have chosen this way of life, nor would her mother ever have chosen the treacly slowness which had been poured into her mental gearbox. All the same, the pair of them had discovered things they would never otherwise have known. Josephine had learned the pleasure of giving love in a place where words didn’t matter, and Helen had learned, perhaps, that it was possible to trust and feel held, however keen her earlier disappointments.

  Josephine went back to her program code. Instructions flitted noiselessly down the modem, exchanging words with other computers somewhere in the London darkness outside. An answer came back and a new screen unfurled, awaiting instructions from its human mistress.

  Josephine stared at the screen. It took her a second to realise what she was seeing. Then, ‘Eureka!’ she murmured, as her hands floated back to the keyboard. She remembered the lessons Miklos had taught her. She’d need to go carefully now.

  9

  Ten days after the party, Ballard phoned back.

  ‘Still want the names?’

  ‘Yes,’ said George, pleased that Val was out of the room.

  ‘OK. I’ve got three possible buyers for you. You won’t like the first one, but they’re by far your best bet.’

  ‘If it’s the Aspertons, then no,’ said George.

  ‘They’re the most obvious buyers. They’ve got the cash. They know your business. You’ve chucked them out of a whole slice of the market that they’d love to get back into. They’d be ideal.’

  ‘Yes. But it’d be like Everton selling out to Liverpool. I can’t do that.’

  ‘Right, but selling Everton to Man United would be fine, would it? Or Juventus?’

  ‘Skip the lecture, David. The answer’s no. Just no.’

  ‘Right you are. The next possibility is a German outfit. Gundrum Mobelsgesellschaft GmbH, Muenchen. Some­ thing like that. I can’t pronounce it. GMG, anyway. I spoke to one of our German corporate staff from head office. He says GMG are dying to get away from German wage costs and want a base in what he called the low-wage periphery. That’s us apparently. Gissings might be perfect.’

  ‘And they’ve got cash, have they?’ asked George morosely.

  ‘Plenty. The only difficulty would be getting them to part with it. They’ve never made an acquisition before and their only country of operation outside Germany is Austria. Yorkshire’s on the dark side of the moon as far as they’re concerned and my friend tells me that they’re a bureaucratic, slow-moving lot.’

  ‘In other words, don’t count on them.’

  ‘There’s always the Aspertons.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK. My last offer is an American group, Oregon Furniture. They’re a tough bunch. They make decent products. They make ’em cheap. And when their competitors start to buckle at the knees, they leap in and buy them up for a song. Then they slash costs and repeat the process. They’ve cleaned up in the States. Now they’re looking to repeat the formula in Europe.’

  ‘How d’you know all this?’

  ‘Head Office. They do a lot of business with Oregon in the US. Oregon phoned them up to ask for the names of acquisition candidates in Europe, and Head Office sent the word out to the regions. I haven’t answered yet. I never do. At least, I only do if a client asks me to.’

  ‘Have they got the money?’ David chuckled down the phone.

  ‘The stockmarket reckons they’re worth four billion dollars. They have unused bank facilities of half a billion. The only question is whether Gissings would be big enough to whet their appetite.’

  ‘And these guys could act fast if they had to?’

  ‘They buy companies for a living, George. They make thirty acquisitions a year.’

  ‘OK. Phone number, please.’ David gave it to him.

  ‘Are you going to get advice? You know, lawyers, accountants, all that.’

  ‘No,’ said George. ‘I hadn’t intended to.’

  ‘It could cost you, trying to do things on the cheap.’

  ‘That’s not the point, though. I don’t need the last penny from the sale, as long as I make enough to pick up Dad’s legacy. Besides, I want the whole thing done as quietly as possible. I don’t want squads of suits charging round upsetting everyone.’

  ‘Anyone in particular they might upset?’

  ‘I haven’t told Val yet, David. But I don’t need your sniping. This is my bloody fa
ctory, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah? What about “All that I am I give to you, all that I have I share with you”? That excludes furniture factories, does it?’

  ‘We’re not bloody married yet.’

  The two men rang off, angry with each other. But George was also upset. For all his outrage, George knew that David was absolutely right about Val.

  She lived in a tiny working-man’s cottage, worked as a secretary in a small provincial furniture company, and she was about to marry the boss. Even if George never got a sniff of his father’s cash, Val was going to be richer than she had ever imagined. Val couldn’t care less if Bernard Gradley’s cash fell into a black hole and never came out, but she’d be livid if George betrayed her precious Gissings.

  David hadn’t asked George the question directly, but he hardly needed to. It was there all the time. If George sold out, would Val still marry him?

  10

  McAllister’s first call from the taxi had been to Fiona. He asked her whether she was aware of any contact between Matthew and James Belial.

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, they do know each other,’

  Fiona had said. ‘I was eating out with Matthew one night and we bumped into this Belial character. A creepy little guy. He greeted Matthew very warmly. Claimed they were business associates. Matthew said they had met once, but that was that.’

  ‘Are you aware of any reason why Matthew should have called Belial from his own personal mobile phone?’

  ‘His personal phone?’ asked Fiona. In her year and a half of going out with Matthew, she didn’t even know he had a second phone. ‘No. I don’t know. What’s all this about?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure yet,’ said McAllister. ‘But I know two things. First, the Stock Exchange is conducting a couple of insider trading investigations at the moment. They’re looking into some trades made just before some of the big deals you and your team have pulled off this year. And secondly, James Belial is a crook. He used to work with us until we caught him selling our trading strategies to a competitor. We didn’t have enough evidence to convict him of anything so we just fired him. Last I heard he was working for some dodgy Swiss outfit. You know the sort of thing. They pretend to have a client list which includes half the royal families of Europe, but in reality they spend their time laundering drugs money, assisting tax evasion, and all the rest of it.’

  Fiona didn’t say anything to Matthew until they got home in the evening. They faced their normal dinner time decision: eat out, microwave something from the freezer, or scrambled eggs. Matthew favoured eating out. Fiona, this evening, insisted on bunging something into the microwave. She wanted to talk with him in private.

  ‘I got a call from Brian McAllister today.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Matthew. He had been worried about McAllister finding his phone, but as the day passed without event, he had begun to relax.

  ‘He asked me whether you knew a chap called James Belial and I said you did. I told him what you said to me at Gianfranco’s that night: that you knew him, had considered investing with him, but had decided against. Then he told me that the last call you made was to Belial.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Matthew again, his belly suddenly diving to somewhere below floor level.

  ‘Apparently McAllister fired Belial some years ago. Belial had his hand in the till and was lucky not to be prosecuted. McAllister thinks that Belial’s current outfit, Switzerland International, is up to its neck in drugs money.’

  Fiona spoke these words gazing steadfastly away from Matthew, out of the window, but at the end of the speech she turned to look him full in the face. It could not be, it could not possibly be that the man she was slowly daring to trust with all her soul could be an insider trader. If Matthew let her down, she would never, never, never risk involvement again. But there was more to tell, and she owed it to him to tell it.

  ‘And one more thing,’ she said. ‘The Stock Exchange is nosing round a couple of our deals. There were some suspicious trades just before a few of them and an inquiry is underway.’

  Matthew stared at Fiona across the table. Oh, Jesus.

  Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Was this how it felt? Was this what Al Capone had felt when the court summons for unpaid tax first fluttered through his letterbox? All those corporate crooks of the 1980s- Ernest Saunders, Mike Milken, Ivan Boesky - was this how they’d felt, when the first sign of trouble had wafted across their desks like the first snowflake of winter? Exposure had ruined them. They’d lost reputation, money, even their freedom. If they’d had women as special as Fiona, they’d have lost them too. Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

  Matthew yelled at his brain to keep cool. Insider trading carries a maximum seven-year jail sentence in Britain, but not many people get convicted. Think. Think. The first rule is to go slow.

  ‘So what does McAllister think I’ve been up to?’

  ‘He has no fixed ideas. I think he called me soon after finding out you knew Belial. He’s obviously worried about the connection. And I think he believes that Belial would certainly be a willing collaborator on any insider trading scam. It does look bad, you know. You know Belial. You’ve got all the insider knowledge of our deals. And ...’ She trailed off. The next bit was hard for her to admit, even to herself. But it had to be said. ‘And, Matthew, you told me you had nothing to do with Belial, yet you call him. And I’ve spent a year and a half with you and you’ve never told me you had a second phone.’

  Her face was strained and white. She looked worse than he did. There was one extra fact, which lay unspoken between them. Matthew had already tried to trade on the inside. The whole Western Instruments fiasco back in New York. Fiona knew all about it and had rescued him from the consequences. He had promised her never again, and she had put the episode down to youth and foolishness. Once might be unfortunate. Twice would be unpardonable. ‘It does look bad.’

  Fiona almost whispered the words. My God, how she wanted Matthew not to prove a villain. Her pain made it easier for Matthew to do what he needed to do. He took her hands in his. He would be as truthful as he could be. Not for the sake of honesty, but because little lies were easier to maintain than big ones.

  ‘My love, it’s OK I did tell you a fib about Belial, because I was so ashamed when he popped up like that at the end of the evening. I watched him pawing you when he helped you on with your coat and I was embarrassed to admit that I’d trusted him with my money. Because I did invest my bonus with his firm. He sold me a story about the prestige of having money at a Swiss bank and I was naive enough to believe it. I gave him my bonus to invest and that’s all.

  ‘As for the phone, that’s simple. I’ve been worrying more about my mother, and bought a phone for Josephine to call me on if there was ever a problem. My work number’s engaged so often, I thought it was safest to have a special hotline.’

  Fiona relaxed a bit. It was so much easier to believe that Matthew was really the loyal, supportive, loving man he seemed to be. It would blow her world apart to find he wasn’t.

  They spoke about it some more, and both grew calmer. Eventually, they relaxed enough to decide to hurry across to Gianfranco’s to fit in some pudding and coffee. They shared a half bottle of some quite excellent German dessert wine and their mood lifted. They got to the cloakroom before the buxom Italian had disappeared and Belial’s alarming presence was nowhere to be seen.

  Matthew was still deeply worried, but he hid it successfully. Convincing Fiona of his honesty was the easy bit. Persuading McAllister would be much tougher. And a Stock Exchange board of enquiry could be terrifying. He’d have to cooperate in full. If he didn’t, Madison would fire him. And if he cooperated, there was no limit to what they might find out.

  But there was something else on Matthew’s mind.

  Nobody at Madison knew that Fiona and he were lovers. They had kept it secret, partly to keep their working relationship smooth, and partly to help Fiona by avoiding any public commitment. McAllister would never have called Fiona with his
suspicions if he had known that her strongest loyalty was not to the firm but to Matthew. Fiona was a spy inside McAllister’s camp and she could be of untold value as things developed.

  But she was also exposing herself. If Matthew was caught and Fiona’s conflicted loyalties emerged, it would look terrible for her. She would look like Matthew’s accomplice, and even if she kept her job, her career would be deader than the dinosaurs. For her, the only safe thing was to tell McAllister about their relationship.

  Matthew wanted her on his side as a spy, but he wanted to protect her more. Matthew remembered Sophie and, for once, to his credit, he didn’t even hesitate.

  That night, as they lay together in Fiona’s bed, he stroked her cheek.

  ‘My love, I want you to do something for me,’ he said.

  ‘Anything, big boy,’ she answered lazily, stroking him beneath the covers.

  He moved her hand.

  ‘I want you to talk to Brian McAllister tomorrow morning. Tell him that you and I are in a relationship. Tell him that we intend to move in together as soon as our house purchase completes. Ask him to keep you out of any decision-making as far as it affects me. Tell him that, of course, you will tell him anything he needs to know. You’ve got to stay out of this and that’s the only way to do it.’

  Fiona tensed up again. Matthew knew she would and cradled her in his arms.

  ‘You need to do it,’ he said. ‘I know it’s tough for you, but only McAllister needs to know. We don’t have to broadcast it round the whole office.’

  ‘I don’t see why we should worry. It’s working so well keeping things quiet. Don’t forget that I can help if I know what McAllister’s thinking.’

  ‘And that’s exactly why you have to tell him. What will he think of you if he finds out you’ve been murmuring all the secrets of any investigation into my ear? You have to tell him. If you don’t, I will.’

  Fiona snuggled up closer to Matthew. He could feel her warm body lying alongside his, from his feet to his shoulder. Their faces were close and warm on each other. She was trying to evade him.